Saturday, October 25, 2014

Indonesia-Penang Trip XI

1 June 2014

Lawangwangi
Fairly speaking, this is very surprising, visiting an art gallery in Indonesia. As much as I do drawings and paintings, I am not much of an art connoiseur. My knowledge of art is very very limited, seeing how I failed/scored weakly in my Arts subject throughout my school year due to the theory exams and my very scarce exposure to art subject in university during history class. Hence, I very rarely visits an art gallery, even in Singapore or Malaysia.

This visit in Indonesia was a surprise as we were to have dinner in this building which serves as a platform for the local artists to showcase their work too. It was called the Lawangwangi Creative Space.

We were welcomed by this big rubik-cube thing.

And there's me while waiting for the orders. We were playing with the cameras...

The area was very cooling. What added to the bonus was the view. We were literally on top of a hill and we could look upon the town below. It was a very nice experience. It did not have those cityscape like in big cities, but it was a very quiet place and for that moment, all those did not matter anymore.

We chose an outdoor seat just to be nearer to the view. We took group photos and also with the insta-photos taken by Fanny! It served as a chilling session, a rest from the trip, to recharge.

Our food came. We were generally there for the view, hence we did not order much except some interesting dishes.

The whole place were quite nicely decorated with some random pieces standing around the cafe and building, like this:

This is one of the flyer that you could take along to know more about the place...

After the meal, we were escorted to this art exhibition. At first we were not very impressed, thinking it was just another art gallery. So when we finally entered the space, we realized why was it awesome.

The artist herself came to give us an intro on her art pieces. These were love stories from old Javan legends, and the artist did not really 'drew' them out. Rather, she wrote them out. Notice how every line and colour on the paintings were actually words? They were words from the stories themselves. So this was really 'a picture says a thousand words' literally?

The big picture itself looked impressive with lots of actions happening at the same time. So what we could see were the words from the stories that wrote into this piece that also depicts a summary of the legend. Boom! At this point, this is already no-simple art. You could see the effort put into the work and guess what - this is not the end.

What happened next was not photographed because our cameras were not good enough for that. The lights were turned off and only UV lamps were shone next to the paintings. Underneath those art pieces, were another painting! And this time, those were paintings depicting love stories from legends taken worldwide from different culture, including English and Chinese. We were mindblown on the spot, of course. We hear this kind of art on Internet and often from others, but experiencing it yourself, having these treasure right in front of you eyes is a privilege.

This was truly a surprising and satifying visit!

According to the others, even this room, taken from outside like this, looked like some studio in some MV or drama. I'm not sure about that....